UCLA Prof Leaving Higher Education Over ‘Woke Takeover’
“For decades, anthropology has notoriously been riven by conflict between scientific and political activist factions”
We’re probably going to see more of this in the coming years. The left owns higher education and has become authoritarian.
Professor Joseph H. Manson writes at his personal site:
Why I’m Leaving the University
I’m a professor, retiring at 62 because the Woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life. “Another one?” you ask. “What does this guy have to say that hasn’t already been said by Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Joshua Katz, or Bo Winegard1?
There’s only one way to find out.
Defenestration of a Colleague
I’ve been a tenure-track professor since 1996 (tenured since 2000) in the Anthropology Department at UCLA. (My research, which I plan to continue doing, has spanned topics ranging from nonhuman primate behavior to human personality variation). For decades, anthropology has notoriously been riven by conflict between scientific and political activist factions, leading many departments to split in two, but UCLA’s department remained unusually peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s. Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty recruited even more extremely militant graduate students to work with them.
I can’t recount here even a representative sample of this faction’s penchant for mendacity and intimidation, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions. But I can describe their public torment and humiliation of one of my colleagues, P. Jeffrey Brantingham. Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of (among other counter-revolutionary sins) “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contains no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembles a religious proclamation of anathema. As you won’t be surprised to hear, Jeff is not a racist, but a standard-issue liberal Democrat.
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Comments
Another Red Pill delivered and taken.
By somebody too old to cure.
Noticing black crimes is now illegal. The AI doesn’t lie that’s why they hate it. FBI statistics show black on white crime is more common than the reverse. This is why the FBI refuses to label any of it a hate crime. A white person is more likely to be assaulted or murdered by a black person and the statistics don’t lie.
Maybe it’s time Prof. Brantingham read the U.S. Constitution and became a Conservative!
I went to UCLA and met my wife there in the mid 70’s. Our family left California in 96 for the East Coast as business transferred me here. I am sorry to see what has happened to UCLA and my home state of California. Most of my and my wife’s family have left the state, but some still remains.